The
North Florida Writers members and guests will critique manuscripts at
the June 9 meeting at the Willowbranch Library. The meeting will be at 2
p.m. Saturday in the basement meeting room at the library. The public
is welcome to attend all meetings.

For
the critiques, someone other than the author of respective works will
read aloud the submissions (up to 10 double-spaced pages of prose, and
reasonable amounts of poetry or lyrics). Authors may not defend their
work, but they may attach questions they would like answered (e.g., “Is
the scene on the beach convincing?”). Authors should listen to the words
and rhythms of their creations.

wins Florida history award
According to Dr. Ben Brotemarkle, executive director of the Florida
Historical Society, Jonathan Bosworth’s paper "Distinguishing Activism
from Journalism in the Career of Stetson Kennedy" has earned the Carolyn
Mays Brevard Award for most outstanding essay or research paper on
Florida history produced by an undergraduate student at a U.S. college
or university.

Bosworth
is a professional writer and journalist from Jacksonville. He graduated
Cum Laude from Flagler College in St. Augustine and worked as an intern
with writer and activist Stetson Kennedy for the final six months of
Kennedy's life. He has worked with Kennedy's "last wife," Sandra Parks,
studying and organizing Kennedy's work since his passing in the summer
of 2011.
The award was presented on May 24 at the Florida Historical Society
Annual Meeting and Symposium Awards Luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Tampa.
The award came with a $200 stipend.

I've
gotten out of the "writer babble" business for two reasons: (1) I don't
know as much as I thought I did, and (2) it's all changing so fast that
even the boldest predictions of digital evolution quickly become
laughable.

I
don't even use traditional publishing as a reference point anymore,
because that is so far removed from most writers' realities that it may
as well be Shangri-la or Hollywood. The indie vs. trad debate is now
only meaningful for a small group of people, and they are all making way
more money than you or I.

So
you are in it, and, if you are lucky, you made a nice little nest egg
back when everyone was standing on the sidelines deciding whether indie
was the way to go. Hopefully, you shook off the intellectual shackles
that chained us to the agent speed-dating sessions at writing
conferences and were hammered and locked into place by "publishing
experts" with 20-year writing careers in the old system.

You
know the mantras: "Get an agent," "Only hacks self-publish," and "You
can't produce and distribute a book without the advice of publishing
experts." Basically, ego affirmation. Of course the experts didn't want
to lose their position of authority (and in the agents' case, the
intermediary status of being the first in line to get checks.)

But
the gate was left open and the horses all got out of the barn, or
something like that (come up with your own gatekeeper metaphor; I am
writing this for free!) So now we have a market where the 99-cent ebook
had a year's run, and the pool was finally beginning to find
stratification (crappy books sinking, good books nailing stable
plateaus) when Amazon unleashed the latest version of indie roulette—the
free ebook.

I'm
on record as predicting the flat-text e-book era has an outside range
of five years, at least for fiction—specialized non-fiction and manuals
will continue to be valuable for their content alone. I believe e-book
sales will continue, but certainly not with expanding profits for all
involved. Now that there are thousands of free Kindle books available
every single day, how long before readers come to expect and even demand
free books exclusively?

Freebie
roulette. Great for readers. Good for Amazon (maybe in the short term,
but it is hard to figure the long term). Terrible for authors.

The
market is diverse enough to support many different price tiers, but
writers who want to survive in 2015 will need to make money off of free
books, or they will soon quit writing.

I
only see one outcome: ad-supported or sponsored books. At first blush,
you'd think N.Y. has an advantage, since Madison Avenue is right there.
But can corporations, with their large structures, be able to compete
when indie or smaller entities can react more quickly to present
conditions instead of protecting some imagined status quo?

J.K.
Rowling can inspire a Pottermore built around her brand, and James
Patterson, Tom Clancy, and Clive Cussler have already built factories
around their names (and, yes, V.C. Andrews, you can roll over in your
grave two or three more times for all I care, because this is all your
fault). But most of us are not factories or we wouldn't have to indie
publish.

This
points out the new era of the branded writer. And not just "writer,"
but "content creator" and even mere "idea marketer." A personality is
more suited to building brand identification and audience than a
publisher is. I say "James Patterson" and you get an image. I say
"Random House" and what do you get? Randomness. We've seen it here
locally: "Ray's Weather" is where you check the weather and "Todd's
Calendar" is where you click to find what's happening in the region—and
both are ad supported. You can get the free content elsewhere, but you
don't get the human personality attached.

I'm
already experimenting with the ad model because I believe it is viable.
I am counting on Idea Marketing being one of my foundational pillars. I
am not quite sure what it all looks like right now, but I look at it
this way—you don't need N.Y. in order to give away tons of free e-books
or to spread an idea or to build a social platform. You are the idea you
want to spread.

Other
authors will say, "I'll never sell out." (Ironically, those are usually
the authors who have given most of their incomes to agents and
publishers.) I don't blame people for sticking with what worked in the
past. It all goes to how invested you are in a certain system and how
the alternative looks, and, of course, the turf where you've staked out
your ego. Publishing-industry talk on e-books uses phrases like
"managing risk" and "cautious adaptation." That is why those of us in
the trenches knew Barnes & Noble was in serious trouble when most in
the "publishing industry" only realized it recently when BN's
horrifyingly bad third-quarter reports came in. They are working off of
old data while I work off the data I got an hour ago.

And
my data says this may be the very peak of the Golden Age of digital
publishing. The $9.99 novel may be dead this year, since three-quarters
of the current bestsellers are low-priced indie books. As fast as major
publishers yank their name-brand authors out of digital libraries, 10
new indies cram into that virtual shelf space. Maybe forever. James
Patterson's factory can't run on $2.99 ebooks, but mine can.

But
what happens when the $2.99 and 99 cents drop to permanently free?
Where's your sponsor? Are you willing to go there? It's not going to be
as clumsy as an image of a refreshing Bud Lite popping up when the main
character enters a bar (though it's not unthinkable at some point). Can
you see Jack Reacher with a favorite brand of soft drink, or Bella Swan
wearing only Calvin Klein? At what point is your willing suspension of
disbelief shattered? At what point do you realize the ad is the only
reason the book can exist at all?

My
informal polling on ad-supported ebooks yields such statements as:
"I'll quit reading before I put up with that." I also remember saying
I'd never carry a cell phone, or be on Facebook,
or give up my vinyl albums, or start thinking that maybe nuclear energy
is the best short-range answer to our energy addiction. Or that I'd
ever read an entire book on a screen.

Laura
Marsh reviews “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” by Henry
Hitchings and the eternal debate about what is (or is not) proper. In
the beginning there was only English. Then grammarians applied the rules
of Latin and Greek to English, and the battles began.

Amid
the joyous inventiveness of Edward Lear’s verse-making, there’s always a
note that is sad or disturbing, says Allan Massie, even as we celebrate
the 200th birthday of this eccentric. Lear was prone to introduce
himself with his long name: "Mr. Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo
Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph" or "Chakonoton the
Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore
& Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps" (not mentioned in the article
actually).

If
you are a slow reader, you will like what Joseph Epstein says in his
review of Stanley Fish’s “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One”:
“The first step [to becoming a polished and elegant writer] is to become
a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work
with the standing of literature.” (So forget about that speed-reading
course that would have you reading 10,000 to 25,000 words a minute.) http://www.readability.com/read?url=http%3A//www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053

First,
the Financial Times has a piece by Sam Taylor, who describes
translation as an art beset with linguistic pitfalls. He went from being
a DJ in Germany to a translator and discusses the craft with
colleagues. He says his DJ background gave him an advantage in
translating sexually explicit works. His piece is followed by an extract
from David Bellos’“Is that a Fish in Your Ear?” (Penguin). Is James Strachey’s English translation of Freud a masterpiece or a betrayal?

Columnist
Steven Uhles for the Augusta (S.C.) Chronicle notes in a short piece
that comic books produce mega-movie hits, but newspaper comic strips
have an uneven record. Unlike big screen successes from Batman,
Superman, and the Avengers, comic strip-related films may be like
“Garfield” (unforgettable). He briefly discusses “Dick Tracy” (1990),
“Popeye” (1980), “Prince Valiant” (1954), “Flash Gordon” (1980), and
“Annie” (1982). A longer discussion could have mentioned that in the
1940s Hollywood used several comic strip characters in B pictures: Dick
Tracy in several, ditto for Dagwood and Blondie. Lil Abner’s Dogpatch
appeared in a B hillbilly comedy in the early 1940s and then in a fine
musical in the 1950s (lyrics by Johnny Mercer). A lot of cross-overs
existed: For example, Superman became a radio show, a comic strip, and a
TV show.

Steven
Pinker is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
at MIT. In this article from his book “The Language Instinct” (Morrow,
1994), he says: “If language is as instinctive to humans as dam-building
is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a
grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and
wired into our brains, why, you might wonder, is the English language in
such a mess? Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool
every time he opens his mouth or puts pen to paper?”http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Man

of

War

Stephen
Metcalf discusses how combat changed Paul Fussell, and how Fussell
changed American letters. Fussell “broke out as an intellectual
celebrity with ‘The Great War and Modern Memory,’ which won the National
Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.”

Mark
Nichol informs readers about the readership-level evaluations in “the
Flesch-Kinkaid system (developed in the mid-twentieth century for use by
the US military and later appropriated to guide drafting of government
documents and evaluate student comprehension).” A writer should not
simply aim for a high vocabulary area, since he or she may stray into
the realm of obscurity and esotericism.

I
always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must
be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come.
…Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to
make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in
this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition.
It's not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives. It
enables me, in some sense.

- Toni Morrison

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WRITERS

BORN

IN JUNE

To check out the names of writers who were born this month, go to this website:

The list includes novelists, poets, playwrights, nonfiction authors, writers for the small and silver screen, and others.

Looking
for your favorite writer? Hit “find” at the website and type in your
favorite’s name. Keep scrolling to find writers born in other months.

Some
writers fret about identity theft and only say they were born in, say,
1972. Typically that means they don’t get included on a “born this day”
list. Recommendation: Writers may wish to create a “pen birthday”; that
way, their names stay on the public’s radar.

THE
CDS PUBLICITY FREE WRITERS CRITIQUE GROUP: Meets twice monthly. The
first Tuesday of each month at the Mandarin Library on Kori Road from 6
to 8:30 p.m., and the third Saturday of the month at the Webb-Wesconnett
Library at 103rd and Harlow from 2 until 4 p.m. Everyone is welcome.
For more information see our website at http://CDSPublicity.com or call 904.343.4188.

FIRST
COAST CHRISTIAN WRITERS GROUP: Every Thursday, 6:45 p.m. at Charles
Webb-Wesconnett Library at the intersection of 103rd Street and Harlow
Boulevard. Email: Dalyn_2@yahoo.com or Tlsl72@yahoo.com.